


Skating In Circles 'Verse Drabbles

by shireness



Series: skating in circles (with no way to stop) [2]
Category: Persuasion - Jane Austen
Genre: F/M, hockey!Persuasion, let's play some bubble hockey babes, playoffs edition
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-09-20
Updated: 2020-09-20
Packaged: 2021-03-07 21:14:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,792
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26554162
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shireness/pseuds/shireness
Summary: When there's games to play and Cups to win, the story doesn't stop.(A collection of sequel snippets to "skating in circles (with no way to stop)", added until I'm out of ideas.)
Relationships: Anne Elliot/Frederick Wentworth
Series: skating in circles (with no way to stop) [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1931137
Comments: 4
Kudos: 42





	1. (so while you can, take a picture of us)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [WelpThisIsHappening](https://archiveofourown.org/users/WelpThisIsHappening/gifts), [optomisticgirl](https://archiveofourown.org/users/optomisticgirl/gifts).



> Back in April, I wrote Laura (@welllpthisishappening) Persuasion hockey fic because she was in hockey withdrawals. Well, it's the playoffs, shit's still weird, and sometimes I have ideas. Even when her beloved Rangers are long since eliminated. 
> 
> (My Stars must have made a deal with a witch to keep going strong, so I'll keep raiding heartwarming videos they post for ideas.)
> 
> Rated T because I swear. In my defense, hockey players do too.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This has actually been sitting in my drafts since late July/early August, when the playoffs and qualifiers first kicked off! I hope you all like it. Title from a Frank Turner song (Polaroid Picture) because me. And it fit.

_ Would you like to video chat once you’re back at the hotel?  _ Anne’s text reads.  _ Video chat _ , she always says; never  _ Zoom _ or  _ FaceTime _ , not as verbs.  _ Video chat _ .

Fred finds it adorable. 

He barely exits the elevator, teammates still close on his heels, before he hits the call button -  _ Facetime _ , if he wanted to get a little more technical. After a few rings, Anne’s face fills the screen - those soft green eyes, now furrowed in concentration as she attempts to figure out the angle, the wispy bangs across her forehead that he’d carefully trimmed for her several weeks ago, to better-than-expected results. She’s beautiful like this - relaxed, unstudied,  _ happy _ . His. 

(God, he’s lucky. Four months have proved that he loves her beyond all reason, and he still can’t believe she feels the same way.)

“Hey, good lookin’,” he teases, just to make her smile. It works, complete with a pretty pink blush, even if she rolls her eyes.

“Hey yourself. That doesn’t look like your hotel room, unless they kicked you out.”

“No, no, me and the boys are just getting back from practice,” he explains, angling the camera so she can catch a peek of Harvey and Benwick over his shoulder. “Haven’t behaved  _ that _ badly yet.”

“Oh, I can call back later, or you can —”

“Don’t even think about it, Annie. You’re the best part of my day by far.” The blush is back. Good. “Besides, I’ll be back to my room in just a minute.”

Somewhere behind him, Benwick gags exaggeratedly. His teammates - his  _ friends _ have gotten used to him talking about and to Anne - he’d dare say they’re even happy for him - but Wicksy has never been the most mature. “This is gross. You’re gross, Fred. Stop making us witness this.”

“Shut up, Benwick. Go call your own girlfriend, it’ll make you less bitter.”

( _ Go have phone sex with your girlfriend _ , he’d normally say, but that will probably result in some kind of bite-back that will do nothing but leave Anne mortified. Better to spare them both.)

“I think that’s enough together time,” Harvey cuts in smoothly like the adult they’re all supposed to be. Harvey’s just the only one actually living up to it. “It’s nice to hear your voice, Anne, now we’ll let you both go.”

“C’mon, you know it’s gross,” Frederick can faintly hear Wicksy say as they walk down the opposite fork of the hallway, even though Harville tries to shush him.

“Asshole,” Fred mutters, trying to wrangle opening his door while still holding the phone with Anne’s lovely face in the other hand. It takes a particular kind of acrobatics, but somehow, he manages it.

“Please,” Anne laughs. The sound is nearly enough to distract him from his attempts to wrestle the access badge and lanyard off his neck and chuck it literally anywhere else. “You love him. He’s one of your closest friends.”

“Yeah, well, doesn’t mean he can’t still be an asshole. The biggest silver lining of this whole situation is that we at least get our own rooms and I don’t have the share with the bastard for once,” Frederick grumbles back. With a great groan, he collapses onto the bed, front side first, bouncing into the bedsprings with a somewhat concerning creak and barely keeping his phone in hand. “God, I’m beat.”

“I can tell.” She’s got that fond sound to her voice, the one he usually hears during lazy mornings in bed when they talk about the best kind of nothing, the one she usually uses right before she reaches to brush hair out of his face. He misses those mornings. “What’s got you so tired?”

“Oh, you know. Starting back in on this for real. Makes me feel like an old man,” he jokes weakly. “Think it’s probably the combo of, like, hours of intense physical activity, surrounded by hours of absolutely nothing to do. One of the rookies suggested we play  _ Scrabble _ yesterday, for fuck’s sake. Like any of us can spell consistently in English. The combo is weirdly tiring.”

“It’s probably something about your brain getting too much and then too little stimulation,” Anne offers. She’s so much smarter than him, without ever making him feel dumb; he likes that. 

“Mmm, sounds good enough to me.” It’s probably just barely audible with the way half his face is pressed into the mattress; he doesn’t particularly care. Especially when it keeps him from staring at the bedside table with two picture frames. “What’s happening with you, Annie?”

“Oh, nothing new. I walked down to the lake, sat by the water for a bit. Made a grocery list for this week. Boring, really, nothing nearly as active as you’ve been up to. The good kind of boring, though.”

“The best kind of boring.”  _ The kind of boring I wish I could share with you _ , he doesn’t say. She almost certainly knows all the same. 

There’d been a niggling little worry at first, that maybe they were moving too fast, that maybe they shouldn’t dive into anything so quickly with the world like it was. Like maybe they should think it through more. But they fall easily into a relationship anyways, because it’s  _ them _ \- it’s him and her, Fred and Anne, in a way that makes him think things like  _ meant to be _ . They exist together in her little cottage in the hills from March all the way through when he returns to the city for camp in July. It’d been like their own little oasis in the most unlikely corner of New Hampshire, relearning each other’s hearts and souls in quiet afternoons in bed or curled on the couch or anywhere else, as long as they were together. It was a quiet little life, interrupted mostly by runs to the store for groceries and supplies or his own increasingly creative attempts to work out or walks hand in hand along the nearby hiking trails. Loving Anne is natural, like a weight lifted from his shoulders he never knew was resting there. He doesn’t doubt that they can weather a distance; this was always in the cards, at least for the time being. He lives in New York, after all, while she lives in Kellynch. 

(That doesn’t make this any easier; Fred doesn’t think the yearning he feels to always be with Anne will ever really go away.)

Their conversation winds, as it does, through the usual stream of pleasant nothings, avoiding the topics they don’t want to think about, like the distance between them or how worried Anne is about him playing hockey right now or how worried  _ he  _ is about her going back to school in September. These are not topics for a call like this, laying in a bed that isn’t his and doing his best to drink in every detail of Anne’s face.

“You seem sad,” she says after a while. “Are you sure you’re alright?”

Fred sighs heavily. This is the realm of stuff they usually avoid talking about on calls, since there’s nothing to be done. “It’s… God, I feel stupid about it.”

“Tell me.” It’s not pushy - Anne is never pushy, even when he thinks she ought to be - but she has a way of working things out of him anyways. 

“I miss you. I miss you and me, holed up at your place,” he says simply. “And before you misunderstand me, I don’t feel stupid about missing you. I’d be missing you if this was a couple of days, let alone the two-plus months this could be if we do well. But there’s guys out there with wives, and kids - fuck, with  _ newborns _ \- and ailing parents and the like and… I feel like I shouldn’t be affected as much, somehow? Like, we were always going to have to be long distance. But I miss you, babe. And the team or the league or - or  _ someone _ had framed photos in everyone’s room that they must have dredged up off of social media, and obviously I’m not complaining about pictures with Sophie and my nephew, but I wish one of them was of you.” He hasn’t touched his Twitter in months - and their fledgeling little thing would have felt too precious to share with the internet at large anyways. But right now, he  _ wants _ .

“I miss you too, Fred.” Anne’s voice is a calming balm, even with a little melancholy around the edges. “But we’ll get through this, okay? Like our own little team, you and I.”

“You and I,” he echoes back, just as much for his comfort as her own.

The moment sits between them until Fred finally breaks it with a half-hearted joke. “Could be worse, I guess.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. At least this isn’t fucking Edmonton.”

———

They lose the exhibition game, despite everyone’s supposedly-best efforts and a fair amount of yelling. It’s not the start anyone wanted to this postseason, even if the game doesn’t actually count, but they’ll take the experience and work to get better by their first qualifying round match. It just sucks for now, in this moment. 

“I bet you’ll feel better when you get back to your room,” Harville comments with a waggle of his eyebrows.

“You seem to think I’ll feel a lot better than I think is actually possible in that hotel room. Dull grey doesn’t really raise the spirits.”

“I’ve got a feeling,” Harville still insists.

It’s not worth arguing - not right now. 

But when he opens his door in a line of identical wood frames, tossing his badge on the desk once again, there’s a third frame there that hadn’t been the night before - matching the others in finish, but with a picture of him and Annie, a candid selfie he’d managed back in June where Anne is laughing as he presses a kiss to her cheek.

_ Harville helped, got a picture to the hotel staff to frame,  _ Anne explains over text when he asks how she managed it.  _ I can’t be there or fix a lot of things, but I can do this. I love you, Frederick - you guys are going to crush it this weekend. _

_ I love you too, Annie. Thank you for loving me like this. _

Things aren’t perfect. They’ve lost the one game they had to get back in the swing of things, and who can even say how long they’ll be stuck in the playoffs bubble.

But Fred has a picture with Annie on his bedside table.

Things are suddenly looking up.


	2. Studying the Tape

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Fully blamed on the Stars social media posting a video the other day of the guys watching messages from home. C'mon, how am I supposed to not turn that into fic in this 'verse?
> 
> Posted in honor of the Stars in the Stanley Cup finals. And winning game one, unless they really fuck this up in the next minute.
> 
> Rated T for language. Just over 1k. Short and sweet.

It’s been seventy-something days in quarantine. Maybe eighty-something. Frankly, Fred’s lost track a bit; he just knows it was July when he left Kellynch to report for camp. Someone else can do the math. 

There’s a particular kind of loneliness to living in a hotel this long. He’s definitely not alone - he’s got bruises from Game 5 and a budding headache from the way that one rookie just won’t stop yammering to prove it - but it’s a loneliness all the same. Boring rooms in a tightly sealed bubble, just living to hit the ice again and the rare off-site rec day. 

Still, it’s paying off in its own way. Seventy-something days means they’re still in this, a cross-country hop later, about to play Game 1 of the goddamn Stanley Cup Finals in another empty stadium after defeating the Canes in five in the Eastern Conference Finals. 

The Rangers hadn’t laid a single finger on that damn trophy. The Avs, winners in the Western Conference, had practically manhandled the Campbell Bowl.

If Frederick was a more superstitious man, he’d say that luck was on their side for that alone.

There’d been practices, obviously, while they were waiting to find out who’d they’d be facing in the Finals, but they haven’t been able to watch film until today. The weirdness of doing this in a converted hotel convention room is starting to wear off, finally, but Fred can’t deny that it’ll be a relief to one day get back to their own facilities. With all due respect to Toronto and Edmonton. 

They watch (more or less). They listen (more or less). It’s routine (more or less), even if these event center chairs are fucking uncomfortable and he totally gets snapped out of the illusion of normalcy if he catches a glimpse of those tall ugly curtains. What’s less routine is the finisher.

“We’ve got a little surprise for you today,” their coach says. At the back of the room, someone’s fiddling with the laptop they’ve hooked up to the projector, the cap placed back over the lens for maximum suspense. They have to create entertainment where they can in the middle of all this waiting, he guesses. 

“Whoa, Coach, we’re in public!” Wicksy hollers, far too close to Frederick’s ear for comfort. For a variety of reasons, not all of them having to do with the volume.

“Go looking for those videos on your own time, Wick,” Harville groans on Frederick’s other side, ever the voice of reason. Speaking for both of them right now, honestly. “No one wants to hear about it.”

“Maybe Louisa, but we don’t want to hear about that either,” Fred adds. “It’s called a private life for a reason, Wicky. Keep it that way, I’m  _ begging  _ you.”

In a horrifying “speak of the devil” moment, Louisa’s perky voice sounds from the deceptively terrible speakers they’ve hooked up to the laptop. “Hey, baby!” she coos. “Congrats on making the Finals, I’m so proud of you!” 

To say that Fred nearly has a heart attack is an understatement, honestly. Of all the things he doesn’t want Louisa Musgrove to hear, this might top the list. As she keeps talking and his panic brain shuts off, however, it becomes obvious that this is a prerecorded video, not a live chat. Which makes more sense in retrospect, but panic brain doesn’t care about that in the moment.

The surprise, it turns out, is a whole compilation of videos from loved ones - wives and girlfriends and parents and a bunch of absurdly cute children, all wishing them good luck for the games to come. There’s so many blue shirts on the projector screen. It’s not like they’ve been totally cut off from the world inside the bubble - there’s still phone calls and texts and Zoom and everything else - but this hits differently. Watching everyone root from them here, on video, feels like the next best thing under these circumstances to being back at the Garden with everyone present to cheer them on. It’s not perfect - but it’s something. It’s touching, in a way probably no one will admit later. 

A cute little kid chattering away in Russian fades out - Frederick only caught “papa” and “Rangers” out of that adorable mess, but her dad beams and chuckles with what must be the dictionary definition of paternal pride - and a more familiar sight fades in. Anne’s living room. The powers that be must have caught on to that somewhere along the way.

“Hi, Frederick,” she says in that soft voice he knows and loves. Her voice isn’t loud, but the smile more than makes up for it, crinkling her eyes at the corners. “I’m so excited for you and the rest of the boys. I don’t know when you’re watching this, but it’s Tuesday here - you should have heard me yell when you scored that goal. Maybe you did,” she laughs.

(It had been a good goal, really - a lucky shot that tied the game to take them to overtime and win. Anne already told him how excited she was, but it’s always nice to hear again.)

“I know you guys are going to do  _ great _ in the Finals,” she continues. “But I’m so proud of you for making it here, regardless of what happens. Love you, Fred. Go Rangers!” she waves to send them off. 

Frederick can feel the way his smile stretches his face as the compilation moves on to someone else’s family. It’s such a simple thing, really - probably took Anne all of five minutes to film, even with goofs, even accounting for whatever anxiety she inevitably mustered up. But - in the middle of this particular weird brand of loneliness, seventy-something days into quarantine bubble life, it means the entire goddamn world.

There’s more videos after Anne’s - even more videos for  _ him _ , when a clip from Sophie and his nephew pops up (“Can you say ‘good luck, Uncle Fred’? Yay, Uncle Fred!”) - and Frederick’s smile barely fades the whole while. The rest of the room is similarly jovial, laughing and smiling at all the well wishers even as the Finals loom large over the whole room. 

And now - well, there’s nothing left to do but go win a Cup.

(He’s got a good feeling.)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading - let me know what you think!

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading! Also (will be) posted on tumblr, where I'm @shireness-says, and I mostly play in a different sandbox. Shoot me a message if you ever have hockey/domesticity ideas you want to see in this 'verse, I'll do my best to write it. 
> 
> I hope you liked these - let me know what you think!


End file.
